Cabrini

dir: Alejandro Monteverde

2024

I admit that I’m not the intended audience for such a film, being a filthy maltheist as I am, baptised into a different strain of Christianity, and a full-throated, ‘til-the-day-I-die loather of the Catholic Church.

Just to clarify, a “maltheist” believes that God exists, but that He really, really fucking hates us.

But I still enjoyed the heck out of this biopic, about a formidable woman who strove her whole life to improve the lot of orphans and immigrants, in general, and Italian-Americans, specifically in the 1890s onwards in the States, of all places.

It helps that they get such a strong actor to play this incredible woman. Christiana Dell’Anna gives a stunning performance as a nun who is hated by the Church, by the whitebread Americans, by the Pope, the Archbishop and the Mayor of New York himself. A woman with that many powerful enemies has to be doing something right.

I have no doubt the backing for this flick came from moneyed up conservatives whose agenda, broadly speaking, is pushing Christian nationalistic bullshit (in the American context), which neatly folds guns, red meat, voting Republican at all costs and no matter the candidate all into an appalling burrito of cloddishness, but I don’t care. I honestly don’t care. This film and the central performance, and the way it’s all put together works so beautifully that I don’t care about the intentions of the people behind it, who think telling the story of what a great person Mother Cabrini was reflects positively on American Christians.

It is the sweetest of ironies that the film, as it openly stands, argues the complete opposite. The entire film argues that Mother Cabrini achieved everything she achieved despite the opposition of almost every single man in power, whether within the Vatican, the Italian Senate, the New York hierarchy, and almost every (non-Italian) New Yorker. You cannot have a more anti-Establishment, anti-powers that be, anti-conservative argument than that.

It’s one of those things you don’t think about that much, especially in these colonised countries, but, as the son of immigrants, I never forget it. The opening scenes of the film, set in a beautifully rendered Gilded Age era New York, have a desperate boy carting his dying mother around in a literal cart, begging for help. Literally begging for help, and yet everyone who sees him refuses even the courtesy of eye contact, cursing him to his face.

For being Italian.

How surreal. Now, of course, a century and a half later, Italian-Americans, like all “good” immigrants, can be relied upon to vote Republican and curse the newer immigrants for stealing jobs from them that they don’t want to do anyway, but, back then, they were pariahs, living in slums, with awful (white) people in top hats and moustaches spitting openly on them.

I also never forget, as a child of immigrants from the southern Mediterranean, that people from that region, in Australia, were also considered, at best, undesirable, and at worst, sub-human by the colonial authorities until the 1940s, and even then, the literal White Australia policy was only changed because they feared invasion from them there Asiatic Countries!

The late 1800s in New York is a time (an era a couple of decades after something like Gangs of New York) where the Italian immigrants are hated just as much as the former slaves streaming up from the South as part of the Great Migration. We don’t see a single African-American during the course of this flick, so, it’s hard to make that much of a thematic comparison. But the loathing whitebread Americans have towards the Italian diaspora isn’t confined to brutish comments; it’s reflected in the violent attitudes of the police and the policies of government.

The Italians and the rest of their cursed kind are confined to the Five Points region of lower Manhattan. Today it is probably all concrete, steel and glass as high as the eye can see and the neck can crane upwards, but back then? Italians, nothing but Italians, and shacks, and filth. Children living in sewers. Corpses in the street. Rats living like kings.

Back in Lombardy, which is now Italy, but back then was somehow part of the Austrian empire, a black-wearing, somewhat goth nun pesters anyone that hears about her desperate desire to minister to the orphans of China. China? Yes, China.

The princes of the divine, apostolic, child-molesting Catholic Church tell her to fuck off. She says “no way. I want to speak to the Pope.” They look at her with loathing for presuming to have opinions and words worthy of repeating in the presence of such holy dipshits when she’s nothing but a lowly nun, and a woman, at that.

The pope (Giancarlo Giannini) says something along the lines of “eh, whassa matta, you? Why you cry about Chinese orphans? Why you no go to America and look after all the Italian orphans in New York City, eh?”

I think this is the only time she goes along with something suggested as an alternate course of action to divert from her determined path. To you and I, who know so much about American and Chinese history and demography at the time, we could be forgiven for thinking “why would she want to go to China, not knowing any Chinese people, and without there being a Chinese concession there controlled by Italy (in Tianjin) for another couple of decades? Who was she going to look after, the orphans of the Qing Dynasty in its waning days? Good luck with that without having the Dowager Empress Ci Xi cut your collective heads off.”

C’mon, we shouldn’t be so huffy. She had a dream, and that dream was delayed, not dropped. She perhaps saw that she and her sisters, all clad in black, with a big bow at their throats, had important work to do in New York, instead.

Up until this moment, all the characters had been speaking in Italian, but, just before they leave Lombardy, Mother Cabrini says to her sisters “And now let’s all talk in English”.

That’s all it took. Now they can speak English.

Upon arrival within 30 seconds some patriotic type spits on the ground in front of her, but she is not deterred.

They walk to find the jerk priest that was meant to meet them at the docks, and he’s all like “oh, you haven’t heard? You should never have come, go back to Italy.” She is not deterred. She goes to the archbishop (David Morse), and he’s like “begone from me, demon woman, get thee back to Italy or at least some other nunnery.” He is completely unhelpful to her for about 90 per cent of the film. But he doesn’t seem to just do it because he doesn’t like being spoken to by a woman, or spoken down to by a woman, or out-acted by a woman, it’s because he hates the Italians too.

No, that’s not fair. He himself is an immigrant child, being of solid Irish stock, but his is a political position as much as it is a patriarchal one. He can easily be manipulated by the deeply racist mayor of New York (John Lithgow, practically twirling a moustache somewhere), who tells the archbishop that he’ll never let him open new churches in new posh areas if he lets the nuns keep doing their thing saving the skins and souls of those disgusting Italian barbarians.

And if you’re an archbishop, not being able to open new locations with which to fleece the weak-minded really impacts on all that money you have to kick back up the ranks to the Vatican, the capo de tutti cappi, the Boss of Bosses of them all.

He forces her into the most absurd (from a practical sense) position, where she is forbidden from soliciting for donations to re-open the orphanage from “white”, proper Americans. She utters the immortal line about being forced to fund her charity for impoverished Italians by only fleecing impoverished Italians, and even the archbishop has cause to pause. They do love the money, them archbishops. All that clothing with gold thread doesn’t just fall from heaven.

All them lawsuits trying to suppress the testimony of the victims of the Catholic Church also don’t get done pro bono, so hustlers gotta hustle.

She finds a way through sheer determination, no matter how many men oppose her, whether at the top of the food chain, or whether they’re in the gutter with the rest of the Italians.

It cannot be overstated – she meets every obstacle, and the obstacles are constant, and don’t stop for over two hours and twenty minutes of screen time, with fierce determination, with almost absolute conviction that she is literally doing the Lord’s work, even if all the jerks who claim to know the mind of God are set against her. All of her sisters in Christ support her without wavering, but even they must have had moments.

Every time it seems like there is a success, or a foothold gained in this awful city, something horrible happens, or the authorities try to bully her, or crims try to bully her, but she keeps pushing forward, again and again, not giving up, despite telling us and anyone else who’ll listen that she’s dying, but even that isn’t going to stop her.

They take over, renovate, make beautiful a tiny space for the abundance of orphans; clothe them, feed them, educate them, and the inspector turns up to either fine them or force them out. They move to a better place upstate, and there’s no water, or the Klan show up, or the cops beat Italians for enjoying some crostata and probably some preserved meats and pleasant singing.

The prejudice never ends, but she keeps trying to side-step it, dodge it, to achieve her aims in order to help as many kids as she can in spite of it all. One powerful (and perhaps misjudged scene, but what do I know) has her addressing a table full of guys wearing top hats (so we know they’re richy-rich fucks) telling them even with all their riches, the whitebread Americans will never let them forget their migrant origins, by repeating all the derogatory terms that they are still called, regardless of their wealth. And because of all that, they should give her money so she can run a hospital.

Why are there so many Italian orphans? It’s not just the fact that there’s a bunch of Italian migration: it’s because the parents, like in the opening scene, can’t get doctors to look at them, and the parents themselves can only get work in the hottest, noisiest and most dangerous industries, which means they can just as easily die from a workplace accident as an untreated condition. And the kids are left to fend for themselves, until they, too, can die in an industrial accident.

The only solution, despite everything arrayed against her, is to create a hospital that will treat migrants. And she does it I’ve seen the movie, I know the history, and I still somehow can’t believe it. But she did it, and she lived way longer than she ever thought she would, and opened hospitals and orphanages the world over, including in China.

Now, you don’t have to tell me. I know, or, at least, I’m aware. I know what the legacy of missionary work is. I know how for centuries it has been synonymous with colonisation, enabled it, wiped out millions, entire cultures. You don’t need to message me with any whataboutisms. I’ve heard them all and I agree with you.

They don’t apply to this woman. There are hospitals that still bear her name, and so they should. That she did this in the name of Christ, and now is celebrated for it, when they opposed her and loathed her every step of the way for her presumptuousness and her audacity, is what I call “dramatic irony” and shows how deeply shitty the Church always was, always will be.

This flick is a golden celebration of an apparently magnificent woman who did something remarkable, and the performances and the central actor capture that and plenty more. The abject shittiness of the Church is also never in question, even when they capitulate to her, because then you think of all the more good Christians they could have helped had they not been such unrepentant arseholes at every stage.

I am staggered, because I can’t imagine that this had that much of a budget, but the cinematography is consistently glorious throughout the flick. I am not smart enough, nor is my eyesight precise enough to always know the difference between digital effects and really well done physical sets, but a lot of the time, I couldn’t tell. There are a few scenes that had to have been computer generated, but mostly the mise-en-scéne is phenomenal.

And the poverty looks so quaint! Just kidding, no, the squalor is disturbing (until you think about how many kids even now in the States live below the poverty line, and then…), but it doesn’t look like slumming for the sole sake of it.

There’s one scene where Mother Cabrini is pursuing a child to find out where they live, and she climbs down in a tunnel, using the last of her strength. The composition of the shot is a work of art in itself, as she collapses. That sounds like a weird thing to point out, now that I’ve written it down, but it really looks amazing, and there are an abundance of scenes like that throughout the flick.

Beautiful soundtrack too, which accompanies the narrative and the action, in complimentary ways, rather than overwhelming the scenes of what is often hard to watch stuff. I’m not ashamed to admit I cried a number of times, mostly in gratitude and amazement towards this living saint.

And I say that knowing that it’s all built on a foundation of lies. It’s just gratifying, sometimes, to see that someone of faith was motivated to do something extraordinary, and helpful, that genuinely helped countless people and did good, rather than, well, you know, all the other shit the Catholic Church has done.

9 times I wonder why they bothered to oppose her in the first place when she has all the momentum of a tsunami out of 10

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“It's a shame that you're a woman, Mother Cabrini. You would have made an excellent man.”
- “Oh no, Mr. Mayor, men could never do what we do.” - Cabrini

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2427962905/?playlistId=tt14351082&ref_=tt_o...